CHAPTER IV

THE POLITICAL PROBLEM OF 1927 AND THE
STRESEMANN FOREIGN POLICY

WITH the formation of the Right coalition we enter what
may be termed the third period of the history of the
German Republic. In the first we see it fighting desperately for
existence against foreign pressure on the one hand, and the
internal forces of dissolution on the other. From the Ruhr war,
which marks the end of that period, it emerged not indeed
triumphant but intact, having overcome the one by surrender,
the second by belated counter-attack. In the second period we
see it endeavouring to regain Germany's rightful place in Europe,
and at the same time to overcome the stubborn resistance to its
effort by the reaction which was no less formidable for having
abandoned methods of violence. It achieved the former by able
and honest diplomacy, and defeated the latter by the sheer logic
of events. Nine years of struggle—in which not only had the
losses, material and moral, been appallingly heavy, but time and
again the nation had been brought within a hairbreadth of total
collapse—had ended in victory. But the nature of that victory
must not be misinterpreted. It was not final victory, the end of
a campaign. Rather it was that stage in the campaign when the
tide definitely turns, when for the first time the enemy is flung
on the defensive, when final victory seems the logical end to the
struggle on the condition that no mistakes are made.

That final victory, if in politics there ever is a final victory,
could only mean the complete liberation and rehabilitation of
Germany in the world, and at home the consolidation and unifi-
cation of the nation under the Republic. The significance of the
victory of 1926 lay, therefore, not in the fact of victory, but in
the opportunity it gave for a period of recuperation and reconcen-
tration, preliminary to the final advance. The task of the new
cabinet was to use this respite to the best advantage.
In the controversial literature which deals with the respon-